Today, data relating to an entity, such as a person or location, is stored in various different data sources. As an example, a restaurant can be featured in a number of different websites through different web services. The restaurant may have its own page with a social network service, another page with an online business review service, etc. Similarly, a person's data can be distributed across various different data sources. For instance, a person's pictures and videos may be stored with several different cloud services (e.g., a multimedia sharing service, a social network service, etc.).
There are several problems with such data that is distributed across different data sources. First, the data is difficult to share. If a person wants to share his or her online profiles with another individual, then the person would have to communicate to individual the different web services the person is a part of, as well as the login names or usernames of the web services. Sharing becomes even more difficult when people changes services (e.g., become a part of a new service, and/or abandon another service).
Another problem with such distributed data is that it can be difficult to search the data. To find data relating to an entity, a person has to navigate to different websites. The person may have to open several different applications to view the data. For instance, the person may have to open a multimedia sharing application to view pictures or videos relating to an entity, open a social network application to view social media posts relating to the entity, open a map application to view location data relating the entity, open a message application to view communications (e.g., emails, text messages) relating to the entity, etc.